My Life and Thoughts

In spring 2007, shortly after the publication of n+1’s “Symposium on New American Writing,” I received an email with the youthful subject-line, “hello!,” from a young person called Ezra Koenig, a recent Columbia graduate and a former student of Caleb Crain (who was next to me in the n+1 symposium, because of the magic of alphabetical order).

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It seems like just yesterday that I was at Stanford’s Building 460, reading with n+1 magazine; but already the time has come for me to make another appearance in this fine edifice. On January 23 at 5pm in Building 460, Room 429, I will be a respondent for Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the historical romance, sponsored by the Working Group on the Novel.

The idea of the Working Group is that everyone reads a paper and a designated novel in advance; then, at the appointed time and place, they all confront the author of the paper, who sits at a long table with a respondent (me), who “kicks things off” with some hard-hitting questions that cut through the rhetoric and get to what really matters to you and me. Dinner will be provided. Think you can handle it? Here are the readings: Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter; and Luba Golburt’s “Seeing History: The Russian Historical Novel between Sir Walter Scott and Les Jeunes-France.”

You don’t actually need a very firm idea of who the Jeunes-France were, in order to appreciate Luba’s paper; nonetheless, I share with you the definition from the Tresor de la Langue Française Informatisé:

A group of eccentric young writers and artists, wearing long hair, forked beards, velvet doublets, and soft fedoras, who, from 1830 on, exaggerated the theories of the Romantic school, drawing notice with their behavior and with their literary and artistic opinions, which tended to alarm the “bourgeoisie”… The most flattering thing for a Jeune-France at that time was to persuade his parents to let him wear a sky-blue habit and the yellow breeches of a young Werther (SAINTE-BEUVE, Literary Portraits).

Alphonse Daudet	Young Werther

Members included Alphonse Daudet (above), who was possibly wearing yellow breeches when that picture was taken… unless the yellow breeches were part of a different look from the forked beard and floppy hat…? I’ll be asking Prof. Golburt when we’re playing “hardball” next Wednesday. (more…)

Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

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When we were in Barcelona, I gave my traveling companion another chance to prove what a good sport he is, by dragging him on a day trip to the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat. Here, one day in the sixteenth century, St. Ignatius of Loyola almost threw himself into a hole in his room, because of his inability to stop writing his spiritual confessions. This was an important moment in the history of graphomania.
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From early February to mid-May, 2007, I suffered from a delusion that I would be unable to complete my dissertation until I read the 6-volume commentary to Don Quijote by Diego Clemencín, a 19th-century scholar whose annotations are based on his experiences attempting to read every single chivalric romance known to Cervantes. This took him so long that he actually died. The commentary was published posthumously by his sons.

I don’t know why I thought it was necessary for me to study the failed chivalric romances that Cervantes was parodying. Definitely, nobody told me to do it. It took a really long time, and so far has yielded two concrete gains:

1. I got better at reading Spanish.
2. While flipping through a library copy of Tirant lo blanc, a little-known Catalan romance mentioned in Don Quijote, I found a $100 bill.

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